A chronicle of my year abroad working as an English teacher in Yilan County, Taiwan

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Third Grade ESL Emotions Rap/Dance-off

Happy hump day everyone! I hope you're all having a splendid week thus far. The weather is finally getting nice and warm (and dry!) here in Luodong, so I'm feeling pretty okay despite a minor weather-change-induced head cold.But, however your week has been so far, I hope that what you're about to see can only make it better.

My fellow ETA, Ari, came up with the brilliant idea of having students say their vocabulary words to the tune of a rap beat to get them to practice saying them. This week, Siena and I decided to try this with our third graders. Our students absolutely loved it! They're currently learning about emotions. Specifically, they're learning the words happy, sad, angry, and sick. Having the kids write their own vocab raps soon turned into them also choreographing their own dance routines as well (and, if you don't already know, break-dancing third graders are just about the most adorably funny thing ever). These are some of my favorite results:

Robby may not be very good at English, but he's a great dancer. So he had his team mates rap while he showed off his skills. He pretty much single handedly elevated this assignment from vocab practice to an unofficial dance-off.

And here we have our class troublemaker. He takes things to a whole new level of awkward at about 0:24. When we asked him about it later, he told us that he had picked up his moves from Michael Jackson. Also, be sure to check out his big finale at about 1:21. Priceless.

This kid is just plain adorable. He's the smallest student in his class but he makes up for it with his huge personality. And who knew he was so aerodynamic?!?

I hope you enjoyed these videos even a fraction as much as I enjoyed being there when they were made! If you're also an ESL teacher and you'd like to try making a vocab rap with your students, try searching "NY rap beats" on youtube. You can find the rap beat I used here.

About Me

I'm the recipient of a Fulbright grant to teach in Taiwan for the 2011-2012 school year. I'm also a Florida girl at heart and a graduate of Elon University. Join me as I venture out into the real world and learn a little bit about a lot of things.